The 22nd Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference

Point and Click and Learn: Not Just Educational Benefits of Adventure PC Games/Animated Films of Czech Independent Game Development Studio Amanita Design

Abstract:This paper primarily examines the educational benefits of adventure PC games, focusing specifically on games produced by Czech company Amanita Design – Samorost, Questionaut and Machinarium (available at www.amanitadesign.net). Those games provide an outstanding example of the ever-closer relation between animation and games, as well as the immense capacity of employment of different elements of comics, visual art, literature etc., in a way that is symptomatic for contemporary trends of animation studies. This paper wants to point out these important overlaps, uncover possibly hidden benefits of these types of PC games and claim their effective use in education.

Biographical statement: Eliška Decká is a Film Studies MA program student at the Film Studies Department, Charles University in Prague. She writes on animation for various Czech journals and contributed to the historically first animation-focused issue of the impacted Czech film studies journal Iluminace. She presented the paper “Autobiographical Elements in Animated Films of Czech Female Directors“ (part of her 3-year research project funded by the Charles University Grant Agency) at the last SAS conference in Atlanta. The current paper continues to employ the methodology of the close author-researcher collaboration with an emphasis on practice aspects of animation studies.